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Creativity and the Dervish

I’ve been quiet lately on this blog, in fact ever since being Freshly Pressed (rather a nice feeling, a bit like being squashed through a mangle – perhaps this explains my new juicing craze). But it’s been an interesting hiatus.

I finally got round to reading Stephen Pressfield‘s fantastically insightful ‘The War of Art’, a book destined for people who have always nursed a dream to do some life-defining act of creativity, or make a longed-for enterprise a reality, or take on a spiritual practice – in short, anything that leads the soul from a lower state to a higher one – and yet who consistently find ways to sabotage their own fulfilment. Why, you ask? Because of Private Enemy Number One: Resistance.

Resistance, Pressfield declares, is that part of you that makes up excuses for not doing whatever activity it is that will satisfy the soul’s longing: ‘I’m not ready yet’, ‘I just need to sort out a few things first’, ‘I need to learn more’, ‘People will laugh at me for trying,’ ‘It’ll probably be rubbish’, ‘I have so many other interests, too’, and ‘Just one more click on YouTube’. (The Internet is Resitance’s evil twin sibling.)

(Copyright M Whiteman, 2012)

Looking around my house, I have discovered that it is in fact a monument to my own Resistance. Instead of finishing the immensely personal novel that I have been trailing around behind me like a liferaft on a rope for the last ten years, I have made ragdolls, clothes for ragdolls, patchwork quilts, clothes for myself and the Cavekids, toy tomatoes out of felt, an unfinished wooden kitchen, an unfinished wooden doll’s house, pillows and blankets for said doll’s house, a panoply of cardboard houses and cars, and umpteen origami animals, paper darts, glue paintings of dried flowers, pipe cleaner people and animals. Even the poems, short stories, articles, and paintings I produce ad hoc are a kind of distraction from the real oeuvre I need to be doing. (Let’s not even mention the blog…)

The core message of the War of Art is that the more you fear doing something, the more you shy away from doing it and find something more pleasant or immediately gratifying to do, the more important it is to your souls’ evolution.

The similarity to Sufism’s call to beware of the nafs (lower self, ego) while on the path of God-consciousness is striking. Pressfield’s theory is based on Jung’s concept of the ego as being a tiny dot in a much larger sphere of consciousness called the Self, which is not confined to the individual but in fact is a part of the collective consciousness. This Self derives its existence from Divine ground.

(Copyright Pmisak, Stock Free Photos / Dreamstime Stock Photos)

The ego doesn’t like the Self; its vastness makes it feel threatened and small, so the ego reacts by attacking our desire to transcend it, belittling our efforts, convincing us that it is hopeless or stupid to do so, and justifying itself with a catalogue of perfectly rational proofs why.

However, if the soul’s evolution depends upon traversing a path that is sometimes actually torture to carry out, then it becomes clear that there is not always just one path that will yield fruits for the hungering soul. A mother with small children who yearns to complete an artistic odyssey is one example. (Hello!)

Here’s is where it starts getting complicated. Your children aren’t part of your ego. They are an astonishing, miraculous, and frequently insanely testing part of your experience on this planet. We don’t NEED an artistic odyssey to give us this arduous voyage of self-discovery; we have one right here in front of us. It keeps us up all night screaming with teething pain, or pukes all over your nice dress when you are about to go out, or tells you that it doesn’t like the cool recycled cardboard castle you’ve just spent hours constructing for it. Your patience, resolve, ingenuity, wisdom and wits are challenged on a daily basis. Why bother looking for ANOTHER vehicle that will do the same thing on a creative or entrepreneurial level?

The answer, I believe, lies in the experience of the creative process. Opening the floodgates of creativity takes you out of the tiny, cramped niche that your ego sits in and takes you out into the wide open plains of the Self. Insights emerge naturally, as though you are simply a bird flying over a landscape, spotting a fish in a river below.

(Copyright George Burba, Stock Free Photos / Dreamstime Stock Photos)

This flight is something that every single human being needs – and needs frequently. Once you have a taste for it, you develop a thirst that will see you pushing yourself to your absolute limits of tiredness to return there. How do we get to that state, that supra-individual consciousness? I reckon there are four ways to effect it: spiritually-intended rituals (prayer, meditation), creative expression, orgasm, and so-called mind-expanding drugs.

Let’s think about it for a minute. In a society where the first of these four has all but been banished by consumerist fetishism and rabidly anti-traditional rhetoric, what is left to us? We seek that enlivening expansion in music, in dance, in sex, in drugs. But in each of those phases, another element is added, another bargaining chip for the ego that wants to sabotage the beauty and simplicity of that experience, until in the last one the unavoidable fact of physical addiction and possible destruction comes into play.

There is no avoiding our need for leaping beyond the bounds of our tiny minds and feeling united with all beings, for having a taste of Being itself. My experience of creative writing really is like gliding through in a current of feelings, images, ideas and meanings that seem to come from way beyond oneself. Writing a story feels like teasing it out of the ether and into materiality, through no other talent of your own than some kind of literary mediumship.

But this is a world that needs guides, that requires discipline. Shamans don’t learn their art by a desultory glance at Wikipedia. Dervishes don’t become dervishes by wearing the latest trend in woollen robes. Great artists, those whose egos are eclipsed by the light they transmit from this expansive realm, don’t become great by faffing about on Facebook all day. We live in a society that is so driven by the need to keep people spending, to keep people consuming, to keep people insecure enough to feel they need some new product, that fighting against this tide is in itself a herculean task.

That is why it is so worthwhile. That is why creativity is a poke in the eye for the crushingly hollow culture of shopping and consumption that so strangles us. That is why, even when there are a million and one necessities tearing my attention in all directions, I will stay up late whenever I can and leave the dishes for the morning, to write, to dream, to fly.

(Copyright Krishgun01, Stock Free Photos / Dreamstime Stock Photos)

N.B. I just watched John Cleese’s excellent talk on creativity and entering the playful, open state of mind necessary for it – it’s well worth a watch.

Thankyou Iman! I think there must be universal challenges that anyone who is passionate about their work faces, whatever their field. The ego – you just can’t leave it on a park bench accidentally on purpose. Love and salams xxx

Indeed Señora Scribblita, I was thinking the same thing as I was making a bathtime boat for my kids this afternoon out of an old Ecover washing up liquid bottle, a few bamboo skewers and a bit of plastic bag for the sail! I do think that children help us boring adults get out of the rational mind and into the playful, open state of mind in which creativity can happen…I think I need to refine my theory somewhat! Yours in flowering creativity xxx